


Alkaline

by metalcide



Category: Terminator (Movies), Terminator - All Media Types
Genre: But hell yeah I ship this too, F/M, Gen, T2 ships let's goooo, but it's just a thinly veiled excuse to wax poetic about how hot T-1000 is, you have to squint to see it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-23
Updated: 2020-04-23
Packaged: 2021-03-02 05:34:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,999
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23809957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/metalcide/pseuds/metalcide
Summary: Sarah and her son's survival will not hinge on the will of a machine, no matter how deadly or alluring.Story context: the setting is basically T3, but instead of a new T-850 it's our favorite blob, T-1000. This is hypothetically an interlude in a story that will never be written.
Relationships: Sarah Connor/T-1000
Comments: 4
Kudos: 12





	Alkaline

The silver crack right down the otherwise too-perfect face was like kintsugi, showing that the machine had been broken before. The terminator was otherwise so realistically human Sarah hoped that its flaw would serve as a reminder of the consequences of its reign of terror; of its failure to do the one thing, the only thing, that it was supposed to do. She hoped it had the capacity to feel shame at its failure or at the distrust of its creator. If the machine actually had a sense of self, she hoped the cracks would humble it.

  
But it moved with a shameless feline grace, face stony not with lifelessness but with confidence. It claimed the present with each step it took; it luxuriated like a king wherever it chose to sit or lie. Each smooth snake-hip sway, each one-at-a-time curl of the fingers oozed regality like it oozed that silver liquid. It acted completely unfazed by defeat, not just refusing to be humiliated but apparently unaware of the concept of humility. It was loathsome. 

She was probably reading too much into it. Falling for the illusion of personhood that the complex device projected.

  
The illusion of humanity was so convincing yet at the same time the machine was so alien, so bizarre in its movements and actions, liquid metal and shapeshifting aside. The birdlike head tilts, the way limp hands ghosted over every surface it could touch, perceiving, feeling things that humans could not, with insatiable curiosity. It would stop everything - walking, even talking, to observe something it hadn’t seen before, or to track something moving fast.

  
Regarding the shapeshifting, Sarah was torn between accepting the discomfort of letting it use its abilities to its greatest capacity and programmed instinct or forbidding it from being so conspicuously inhuman and a creature of deception even in complete privacy. The ability to mimic different personality stereotypes was the most disturbing and infuriating thing, though, because the machine was created to be a liar. But at other times, the alienness, the inhumanity of the entity reminded her to feel guilty every time she accidentally viewed it as a human, as a man; as captivating and enticing and as capable of being so; as morally responsible for its actions. But it didn't act like a machine, it acted more like an experimental lifeform. 

  
It had soon become clear that unlike the T-800, the T-1000, while more sophisticated, was indeed a prototype with bugs and glitches. The massive amount of damage the unit had acquired at the steel mill weakened it, perhaps permanently. Knees buckled under it as its legs melted, eyes wide in distress as it literally gathered itself together. Dewy skin gave way to a rolling wave of smooth silver as the color momentarily faded away. A scream out of some kind of suspend mode; a hand stuck to the wall that got ripped off and slid to the floor. Coughing up dead mercury it couldn’t reabsorb. These flaws unfortunately made Sarah accidentally feel bad for it every once in a while despite her justified hatred and distrust of the openly malevolent killing machine.

  
Without the crack in its face, which it could shift around and move somewhere else if necessary, the T-1000’s default visage couldn’t be more innocuous. Its eyes were big, triangular and blue with golden rings around the center and even a little brown freckle on the left iris for realistic asymmetry. Long but light eyelashes shadowed defined and refined cheekbones. Its nose was ruler-edge straight with a perfectly balanced tip; its angular jaw 45 degrees from elf-ears to square cleft chin. Thin lips, deep brows and a high forehead heightened the narrowness of its face and body, delicate and slight compared to the brawny T-800. Thin wrists, thin waist, thin hips. Long fingers, long arms, long legs, long neck. Indented lines carved on its forehead but otherwise smooth skin other than a beauty mark placed with care under its lip. He - it - looked not unlike a deer, even if it moved like a panther.

  
The illusion of hair gel darkened and straightened what was actually a messy swath of loose ginger-brown curls - hardly intimidating, but fitting for such pale skin speckled with the occasional mole. There was a purpose for its appearance: disarming vulnerability to weaken its prey’s defenses, should its target have been someone different. Should it have been her.

  
And unlike the T-800, it could smile, but the smile was thin and flawed in a way that Sarah couldn’t articulate. It looked entirely human and real, but it was imperfect, almost uncertain, like it wasn’t ever supposed to be there. While imitating certain types of people it was roguish and charming and lopsided but - there was something too intense in its gaze. When in its default form, when not acting or playing a role and being a lie by mindlessly executing a program that wasn’t its real identity - it never smiled, not with teeth; perhaps it couldn’t. But then again, Sarah never smiled, either.

  
Sarah snapped PTFE linings into hollow-point bullets. She would fill them with corrosive base and practice on the prototype mimetic polyalloy they found in the field laboratory. Sarah had given the terminator a little to see if it could replicate its own structure to repair itself. She gave it no other help because keeping it weak was beneficial right now. It claimed wanted to keep John safe just in case the T-X had been sent before Cyberdyne had been bombed and before Skynet’s mainframe had been disabled by John’s army. Apparently the T-X would have been sent to terminate T-1000 had the latter successfully killed John. But now it would have to kill both. Still, Sarah couldn’t afford to let the prototype be indestructible again. She also couldn’t afford to let it get caught by the government. She did plan on destroying it sooner or later, just as Uncle Bob had needed to die to make sure his technology didn’t get into the wrong hands and restart Skynet all over again.

  
The T-1000 was sitting next to John on an empty table tens of yards away from her in the warehouse as the boy did his homework. He was currently enrolled for the year at Santa Susana Middle School in 6th grade. The mother was more than wary of the hovering assassin and the hairs on the back of her neck rose with it being so close to her son despite an uneasy alliance. Time had passed but this was still the very same unit that had hunted, toyed with, taunted, wounded, mocked, and almost murdered Sarah and her child; the very same unit that honest to God looked like it enjoyed every minute of it. Uncle Bob, while a T-800 like the one that came after Sarah a decade prior, had been a different unit - a different individual - entirely, just of the same terminator model. T-1000, on the other hand, was the same individual terminator whose target had been her son. What was she doing? This was absolute madness, she was inviting the death of her child. For a heartbeat Sarah felt trapped, but then she remembered her work.

  
But here T-1000 was helping its ‘target’ with science homework. Why? It wasn’t programmed to do anything for John like Uncle Bob had been. This was outside of the purview of making sure John stayed alive, its proclaimed current objective. John, young and curious and easily excited, was already over the days of hell they went through because of this thing and was asking it questions like he would a tutor or a father. But unlike the programmed T-800, Sarah could not be sure that this terminator would never hurt or abandon John. She could not be sure that it would always protect John.

  
Hence the corrosive hollow-points. She would not be held hostage.

  
She unscrewed the cap on the clear glass vial of sodium hydroxide, steadied a lined hollow-point on the surface of the table and used the glass syringe to fill it with corrosive. She screwed on the PTFE tip. She did this five more times before fitting them into casings and loading them into a magazine fitted for a .22 Glock. She snapped the magazine in place and cocked the weapon.

  
“T. Come here.” T-1000 refused to be referred to by an actual name when not pretending to be a normal person. It held disdain for humanity and did not let her forget it. Names were for _people_. Its excuse? 'I don’t need a name besides my model, there’s only one of me.’ Arrogant prick. Sarah thought the machine’s default form looked like a Jake, or maybe a Luke. (Or maybe it just looked like Luke Perry.)

But if John called for an “Austin,” the name on the badge of the poor officer it killed, the machine’s head would turn. She’d seen it happen.

  
“Hold on,” it replied in its perfectly American, city-southern voice. Having a fucking robot disobey a command just went against everything she had ever seen or heard about robots, fictional or not. It contradicted the ruthless programming of the first T-800 and laughed in the face of the dutiful Bob even after read-write mode had been enabled. T-1000 was a machine built by a machine, designed to destroy humans, not to obey them. Despite technically being from Los Angeles, it was like a foreign invader and it did not belong here.

  
“Ass here now, Gumby.” Its whatever-liquid databases would have information on Gumby. It knew Gumby was an insult.

  
“Do you want your son to fail out of school?” Nobody would argue that the robot wasn’t smug and the smugness dripped from its whispery voice. It was doing this just to be difficult.

  
“Hey! I won’t fail …” Her boy’s voice petered out before the sentence ended, no doubt influenced by a look on the robot’s face. It was a conspiracy. Her son was turning against her, apparently.

  
Sarah stared at the robot’s back. Thankfully it wasn’t shaped in that poor Officer Austin’s uniform. That form was banned unless it was useful for them. Instead, it wore something reminiscent of the two T-800s, but its jacket was white: pristine, immaculate. The machine was very focused on appearance, which Sarah supposed made sense given its function, but it was still kind of funny. The T-800s, even the one that had tried to kill her, were also bizarrely focused on image. Must have been a terminator thing. Kyle had told her terminators stopped at nothing, but they seemed to stop for fashion.

  
The robot (and to be clear, it was a robot - not a cyborg, mind you, as that would imply organic parts polluting its most pure mechanics) gracefully leapt off the table. It elegantly twisted around before sauntering over to her. Its face? Blank. But something was there in its eyes. Something infuriating, even if just the imitation of self-aware emotion. It looked like it knew exactly how it looked and what it was doing at all times. But it was a machine, she reminded herself. It could not have that kind of self-awareness, it just couldn’t. It insisted so itself - it was not a 'he,’ it was not a 'they.’ It was an 'it,’ a machine, not a person. A philosophical zombie. Dehumanizing - exactly what it wanted, since it viewed itself as superior to humans. 

  
She waved her hand to indicate where she wanted it to go, so that the bullet-riddled wall, instead of her son, was behind the robot. The robot moved as indicated. It looked to the side, glancing back at the table, and Sarah aimed her handgun, firing off the first three rounds just as they locked eyes again.

Those terrifying mercury entry-holes marked where the robot’s mimetic polyalloy had been pierced, but the bullets did not go all the way through; instead they broke apart upon impact and the edges of the entry “wounds” sizzled: the small amount of sodium hydroxide released ate away at the polyalloy. Success. The android hissed like an alien upon being struck, and, for some reason, held its arms in front of its face defensively as if it were a human and as if that would have any effect whatsoever on anything that hit it ever. Every place on the blob was exactly the same; limbs, head, hands were all just for show. So why the human reflex?

  
She lowered the weapon. _Success._

  
The machine sounded like brakes screeching as it snarled in its undisguised voice, hunched over with silver claws scratching at the wounds in its stomach, chest, and shoulder with not only both arms but an extra one, too. The metal corroded - bubbled, even. There was real destruction occurring. Not a lot, but it was a start.

_These fuckers could be stopped._

  
And it felt good knowing they could be. That she had something in her puny human arsenal that could actually _harm_ the T-1000 besides a crucible or a volcano. It gave her a little power.

  
“How did that feel?” Sarah asked, all business, even if she wanted to smirk. She still wanted revenge against this fucking machine and she could finally get it.

  
When it was hurt, all pride and arrogance were gone. When in distress it couldn’t really hide its reactions - stoic as it was, it hardly ever felt things, but when it _did_ feel there was no proud attempt to hide it. As it continued to fuss, Sarah stepped toward it and raised the gun again. Its furrowed brows gave way to a wide-eyed flinch as she shot it more, in its fake throat, its thigh, and its palm. The final shot ripped a high-pitched hum from the device and forced it to focus entirely on the damaged hand. T-1000 tended to activate special tactile sensors in the nanobots that it used to create hands. Running its hands over unfamiliar things. So _that_ shot was purely for pain, whether it felt pain or not.

 _I know this hurts._ Did _that_ hurt, motherfucker?

  
“Mom!” John complained. “You’re shooting guns and he’s screeching and how am I supposed to do my homework?”

  
The android cradled its mangled hand, ignoring Sarah as she approached. “Stop overreacting. I didn’t shoot your dead spot,” she complained, “let me see.”

  
“You made it bigger,” it muttered, offering its hand. The palm was but a hole, a stretched ring of dull silver that left frozen ripples in its warped and displaced fingers.

“My sensors,” it whined. Sarah noted that the actual damage, while clearly permanent, did not extend all that far. A grenade of some sort would probably be more effective. She ran her thumb over the corroded edges of the hole in its palm. It jerked its hand back.

  
“Stop being so dramatic,” Sarah sighed. It was so unabashedly incapable of taking what it dished out.

  
It offered its hand again. This time Sarah didn’t touch it, she merely watched it self-repair. The hole closed into a small gray dead spot in the middle where the nanites had been destroyed completely. T-1000 watched, too.

  
“I can’t recover this essence.” Essence, the term used by the machine to refer to the equilibrium state of its nanobot swarm, maintaining ('recovering’) which was its primary directive, much like an organism’s primary directive was to stay alive.

  
“Sodium hydroxide in a hollow-point bullet. What do you think?” Just a little pleasure spilled through Sarah's voice.

  
A couple seconds of silence. The T-1000 closed its fist in an elegant cascade of fingers.

  
“I doubt the efficacy of these bullets in a handgun. Take us by surprise, induce momentary panic. This would only serve to make us more hostile. But put them in an assault carbine, and I would be–”

  
In trouble, Sarah thought triumphantly. Flawed. Vulnerable, even if just slightly.

  
“… Hypothetically you could terminate anything made entirely of mimetic polyalloy if you were able to maintain fire for long enough, though it would be unrealistic.”  
The machine’s demeanor changed. Just moments ago it had thought it was invincible. Now? Turned out it could be destroyed with human technology made of common materials. This meant it had _two_ vulnerabilities: extreme (extremely extreme) temperature exposure, and prolonged or at least internal exposure to extreme corrosives.

  
“This will not be effective against steel or iron, or against endoskeletons, since metals are not soluble in bases,” the thing warned. Sarah felt like it was mansplaining to her even though it wasn’t technically a man.

  
“I know. It’s only for the delicate terminators like you.”

  
It took a silent, fake breath, face unmoving but shoulders rising and falling gently, annoyed. Sarah was wary, but the new discovery took off the edge of anger at perceived helplessness. Now she had _something -_ even if just in theory. _Something._

  
“The instability of the liquid in the hollow-points will wildly affect trajectory in an automatic weapon. And if it gets jammed it could melt your weapon. And then kill you. If you transport them incorrectly, and they leak, they will kill you. If PTFE the linings start to degrade because you store them somewhere hot, the bullets will kill you.”

  
Honestly? Worth it. No less dangerous that a crucible or a volcano. That these were a danger to humans wasn’t different than anything else that would harm a T-1000. Sarah glanced back at her working table.

  
When she looked back, T-1000 was melting into a pool of silver and camouflaging itself on the paved ground, becoming invisible but for a hairline glimmer of a silver crack. It slithered off somewhere to sulk, no doubt.

  
“Mom, he was helping with my homework!” Her son, the reason for all of this, her reason for trying, managed, as he always did, to bring her back to reality.

  
“Hold on, I’ll help you.”

  
Within minutes she discovered that there were a lot more parts to a cell than she remembered there being when _she_ was in school. What were kids even learning these days?


End file.
